7 Powerful Tools for Building an Email List for Your Small Business

So you want to know which tools can help you build an email list from scratch or give it a well-deserved boost? I hear you.

Some may argue that getting visitors on your website and social media pages is of little value if they don’t share their contact details with you. And if visitors do share their email address, you need to engage with them on a regular basis because every incoming contact (let’s call them leads) is your potential client.

Building and managing customer relationships is essential for generating new leads and conversions for your business, and email marketing is one of the best ways to achieve this. By sending emails to your existing customers and prospects regularly, you’re building trust and reminding them of your presence, thus warming them up to take the next action, e.g. make a purchase or recommend your products to their family and friends.

You’ll need to encourage visitors to sign up to your email list when building one. Keep in mind that most of us are tired of receiving spammy promotional emails, so you need to show real value. Offer either of the following in exchange for their contact details:

Special discount or offer

Free ebook, whitepaper or report

Content or service upgrade

Newsletter subscription with exclusive access

Free trial to your product or service

7 Cost-effective email list building tools

You can use this plugin to create popup forms (i.e. lead capture forms) for your website pages. The plugin is fairly easy to set up and use - you don’t need coding skills to start creating your first opt-in form!

OptinMonster also helps you to analyze form conversions and test which form types are doing the best. You can even create exit-intent popups - these forms appear on the site when a visitor is about to leave based on previous insights.

The tool has a variety of design options available and makes it easy to create forms that suit the design of your site. There are three opt-in form types available:

Lightbox

Footer Bar

Slide-In

This lead generation software integrates with quite a few email marketing providers and CRM services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Infusionsoft and Active Campaign. You can even automate your list building process, removing the need to manually transfer data from your website to your email or CRM service.

Ever wondered if a simple change of text would entice your visitors to submit their details more often? Then you need to try Optimizely. This tool allows you to split test different page copy and other elements without making any changes to your original website.

Just like with website copy, you can create a number of variants for your popup, contact form or contest banner, and then test each individual part, like the color of the call-to-action button, text or image, and then see which combination is producing the best results. This way, you can create the most effective forms that will convert many visitors into leads. You can easily set up Optimizely on your website by adding a piece of code to it.

Landing pages are a great way to entice whitepaper downloads, trial sign-ups and even purchases. Unbounce makes it easy for you to create attractive landing pages - you can choose from a library of templates to match your campaign or create a page from scratch with its drag and drop page builder. What’s more, Unbounce offers analytics and split testing (A/B testing) as well.

For example, you can design a page, but can’t decide on which of the two or three titles would resonate more with your audience. With this tool, you can quickly duplicate the original page, change the text in versions B and C and then test how effective each is.

Advertising on social media may be the way to go if you already have a large following or a strong presence. Facebook's Lead Ads are good for collecting sign-ups for newsletters, follow-up calls and other types of business information.

What's great about them is that the actual contact form is included in the ad, so it's easy to fill in after people click on it. You can also ask a question to learn more about your new prospects to create a custom email later on.

Facebook has over 1.94 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2017 and great targeting options which give you a massive pool of people who could potentially become your clients. You can also easily transfer the acquired data and send it to any of the popular CRM tools like Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign and Hubspot.

This tool allows you to run exciting contests and giveaways on your website, Facebook Page or blog. There is a free account that you can try today to see if giveaways work for your business and audience.

The paid accounts do give you more functionality though, like email list integrations, custom themes and the ability to track entries from multiple social networks like Twitter and Pinterest.

Rafflecopter even guides you when creating forms, making sure you don’t miss out the important details of the giveaway like:

Similar to Rafflecopter, WooBox helps you create sweepstakes, contests and giveaways. As they put it, their tool “makes creating engaging marketing campaigns simple and fun”.

This tool has an extensive number of features for the paid plans, but their free account will also prove quite valuable to you. With the free plan, you can create tabs for your Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube profiles and start building your email list by collecting contact details.

A robust publishing platform, LinkedIn Pulse helps you build authority in your niche. Use the platform to publish expert content consistently and engage with your network on LinkedIn. This will show your business expertise to your target audience and raise your brand awareness that can attract the right new clients.

You can then start adding a call-to-action at the end of your LinkedIn Pulse articles to redirect users to your newsletter subscription page or another appropriate landing page.

Over to you

It’s unlikely that someone will come to your website and buy immediately from you. But by collecting one’s email address and gently nudging them into the direction of action works. Therefore, building an email list is a great way to show value to your prospects and convert them into loyal customers.

With the right set of tools, you can build your list cost-efficiently and ensure that it’s relevant, filled with people who have expressed a genuine interest towards your brand. Building an email list will take some time, but it will grow over time and has the potential to give you a lot of business in the long run. Hope you give these tools a spin and let us know how it goes - we’d love to hear your feedback.